Property, Law, and Public Health in England and Wales, 1815-1872

Overview

Overview

Argues that the legacies of Victorian public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property, liability, and community.

This book argues that the legacies of nineteenth-century public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property and people. Between 1815 and 1872, the work of public health activists led to multiple redefinitions of both, shifting the boundaries between public and private nuisances, public and private services, taxable and nontaxable property, cities and suburbs, the state and the individual, and, finally, between different kinds of individuals. These boundary-making processes were themselves inflected by different material, political, and ideological developments in the areas of disease, demography, democracy, and domesticity.

The changes in boundaries manifested themselves in the creation of new nuisance laws and in the minute control by the state of private domestic arrangements. Most important, these changes also promoted a radical shift in ideas on who should bear financial responsibility for the health of others, stimulating in the process a controversy on the nature of community. Public health thus served as an important, if contradictory, site in the creation of communities, enhancing the right to health for some while simultaneously restricting in the name of health the privacy rights of others. Relying on underused legal sources, this book presents a fresh view of the local origins and legal and political significance of the public health movement of the nineteenth century.

James G. Hanley is associate professor of history at the University of Winnipeg.

Related Titles

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroductionThe Laws of Nuisance before 1846: Property, Health, and Democracy in the Age of ReformPrivate Benefit and Public Service: Paying for Sewers before 1848The Boundaries of Health, 1848-70The Benefits of Health: London, 1848-65Healthy Domesticity, 1848-72ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex